Justus Lipsius's Monita et exempla politica was a long time in the making. He had published the six books of Politica in 1589 at Antwerp, but the Monita et exempla, which purported to illustrate Politica's arguments, did not appear until 1605 at Antwerp, and then only in two books rather than the originally intended six. Sir William Jones translated a mildly expurgated version of the Politica into vigorous Tudor prose as Politickes or ciuil doctrine in 1594, and Jan Waszink issued his own superb parallel-text edition and translation in the Bibliotheca Latinitatis Novae when it was being published by Van Gorcum. That series has since moved to Leuven University Press, and this new edition of the Monita et exempla—the very first translation into English—has been constructed along broadly similar lines to the Waszink Politica and makes for a handsome companion volume. It, too, has been a long time coming: the core scholarship here was executed by Marijke Janssens for her 2009 doctoral dissertation at KU Leuven, and her former supervisors Jan Papy and Toon Van Houdt have completed the work of preparing the edition for publication.
On the one hand, it is really excellent to have the Monita et exempla far more accessible to nonspecialists than has hitherto been the case. On the other hand, this new edition might confirm any preexisting scholarly suspicions that the approach to politics articulated by Lipsius in these pages is just less stimulating than what he had earlier presented in the Politica—and may perhaps prompt the reflection that it may not be so surprising after all that Monita et exempla has not appeared earlier in English. The Politica offered a subtle, open-ended account of political morality, sailing pretty close to the Machiavellian winds with its controversial defense of deceit, which Lipsius called “mixed prudence,” and in his subsequent correspondence with the Index, after his return to Louvain and reembrace of the Catholicism of his youth, Lipsius was willing to tone down his core arguments without abandoning them. In the Monita et exempla, by contrast, Lipsius presents a perspective on politics far more amenable to blander Catholic pieties—less on prudence and more on justice, with a more straightforward condemnation of Machiavelli and more criticism of the use of deceit than found in the Politica—and although one might think that the literary form of a commonplace book invites critical reflection on any slippage between the original sources and Lipsius's re-presentation, the Monita et exempla has far fewer suggestive ambiguities than did the earlier work.
It is significant, for example, that the two completed books of the Monita et exempla illustrate the first two books of the Politica, which are the most platitudinous in that collection. Scholars, by contrast, have generally been considerably more interested in the discussions of prudence in books 3 and 4 and the treatment of military affairs in books 5 and 6. And since the various anecdotes and examples that fill so much of the Monita et exempla, mostly from ancient sources and many quite familiar, are only of limited interest (though the presence of various Ottomans makes for a different cast of characters to those that we find in, say, Machiavelli's political writings), the part of the work that easily commands the greatest attention is the extended apologia for hereditary monarchy across the opening four chapters of book 2, where Lipsius amplifies arguments set out in the Politica—including his extended attack on women rulers (the occasion for William Jones's editorial interventions when publishing in Elizabeth I's England).
The shortcomings of Lipsius's own achievement aside, this volume has been commendably well assembled, with an extremely thorough introduction set out over more than a hundred pages, a readable, accurate English translation of the Latin, eighty pages of commentary, and thirty-five of bibliography. This is an edition of the Monita et exempla to stand the test of time, and it is excellent to have it available after so many years.
